Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Peces de piel fugaz [Fish of Fleeting Skin] (1977), El ser que va a morir [The Being that is Going to Die] (1981), Tierra de entraña ardiente [Earth of Burning Entrails] (in collaboration with the painter Irma Palacios, 1992), La voluntad del ámbar [The Will of Amber] (1998), Ese espacio, ese jardín [That Space, That Garden] (2003), which was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 2004. Among her many grants and prizes are the Aguascalientes Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Nation, and Poetry International. Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander, was released by New Directions in 2008.

Poems written by Coral Bracho and translated by Forrest Gander. Reprinted with permission from Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems, Spanish. New Directions, 2008.

--From this door, the pleasures, their thresholds;
from this ring, they’re transfigured—

In your forests of liquid sand,
of dense, pale jade (deep water, cleaved;
this door carved into the naves of dawn). I’m unsettled
in your cascade—Water
clinging to the light (at your body the rivers merge, hardening
between nitrous ceiba trees. Flame—door of igneous glimmer—
you circle and sweat me out: over this glaze, under those spongy valleys,
between this mantle, this flesh

In your fathomless waters,
in its jade
quietude, welcome me, spectral earth.
Earth of silences
and scintillations,
of dreams quick as constellations,
like filaments of sun
in a tiger’s eye. Give me your dark face,
your clear time to cover me,
your soft voice. In fine strokes
I speak.
With quartz sand I draw out this murmuring,
this spring bordered by crystals.
Give me your night;
the igneous expression of your night
so I might begin to see.
Give me your abyss and your black mirror.
The depths open up
like star fruit, like universes
of amethyst under the light. Give me their ardor,
give me their ephemeral sky,
their occult green: some path
will clear for me, some tinge
in the coastal waters.
Among your tenebrous forests,
earth, give me silence and intoxication;
give me a wafer of time; the flickering
and flaking ember of time; its exultant
core; its fire, the echo
under the deepened labyrinth. Give me
your solitude.
And in it,
beneath your obsidian fervor,
from your walls, and before the breaking day,
give me, in a crevice, the threshold
and its furtive flamboyance.

When someone enters a room,
time and plot shift
in their web of occasion. Each minimal
aspect, each gesture,
each mental space and its sensation
filters the lived context, elastic
intercession,
inclination.
Innumerable possible concretions
awake,
shake loose. –All of it conjoins
and fills with feeling:

The rock
about to fall
alters the well
and the water
that inexorably, as it drops,
alters it.

Forest stream. “Your palms are red from raspberries,
rinse them.” Water so clear, I’m reluctant
to stain it with even the sweetest juice.
“It’ll do no harm. The water here is eternally clear,
because she swam here. She, who plants flowers
on abandoned graves and gathers up
forgotten songs.” Have you seen her?
“No, but the water is eternally clear. Rinse your hands.”

Like an irrupting wind it lifts
over the swell
its open sun.
Like a tune unraveling, spooling out
into a dark garden:
Knots that glow and come undone;
limits that dissolve and transluce
a filtered amplitude; threads that tie up
and tease out into shadows a woven flame. Ciphered,
spilled cadence. Touching

the water’s edge,
the burning sand
leaves its brief mark, its bottomless thirst.

And this rock magnetized by the night’s quiet
which leads us forward and guides us through it. Star. Impulse that radiates,
concentrates.
That we bear in our hands like a realm.
Like a close-fitting amulet.
--Knowing which conceives
and its spilled blaze:

Stag that inaugurates the thicket. Sun
that engenders and interlaces the darkness.
Vestige,
nocturnal light that delineates and decants us; that bewilders
and sustains us. That verges on vision.